Times Union Best Pizza in the Capital Region: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Times Union Best Pizza poll is and who runs it

The Times Union, the Albany daily, stages Best Pizza in the Capital Region as part of its annual Best of the Capital Region reader poll. That survey has asked readers to nominate and vote for the area's best pizza since 1997, which makes the pizza ballot one of the longest-running traditions in the paper's contest portfolio.

The ballot lives on the newspaper's own website, inside its projects section, with no outside polling platform involved. Organizer and host are therefore the same newsroom, and the voting address is timesunion.com/projects/best-pizza-albany. Its market is the Capital Region corridor of Albany, Saratoga Springs, Troy and Schenectady, all in New York.

Pizza is the headline draw of the wider survey. The paper's own framing is blunt about why: the Best of the Capital Region pizza categories consistently bring in the most votes, because New York is known for pizza. That positioning turns this single-food ballot into the most contested slice of the publisher's reader contest.

Which editions of the pizza poll belong to the calendar

Five edition years stand confirmed for this ballot: 2018, 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026. The organizer describes the parent survey as annual, and the pattern points to a 2027 cycle as the next expected run. The gaps between the listed years reflect what has been verified for the pizza ballot specifically, not the full history of the parent survey.

The 2023 cycle left the clearest dated trail. Its nomination coverage ran through October of that year, and the paper's nomination story carried an Oct. 13, 2023 update. The Times Union prints no day-by-day open or close times for the pizza round itself; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Scale is the one figure the organizer does put in writing. Its 2026 nomination appeal invited entries across the full slate of the Best of the Capital Region survey, of which the pizza division is the flagship. No round-by-round schedule accompanies the pizza ballot either, so the nomination and voting phases are the only structural signposts a supporter can plan around.

How a supporter casts a vote in the pizza round

The ballot moves in two phases. First comes the nomination window, when readers submit the Capital Region pizzerias they believe deserve a slot; the 2023 example showed that window sitting in October. Then the voting phase opens, and the outcome passes entirely into reader hands.

The organizer's published FAQ is specific about cadence. It states: "Each individual may vote once per day during the voting phase of the Best of the Capital Region." That is the only vote limit the paper puts in print for this survey, and it shapes everything else a supporter does: a vote cast today does not carry forward, so steady daily participation beats a single burst.

Mechanically this is a straight public vote hosted on the Times Union's own domain. There is no judging panel and no editorial overlay on the result; whichever pizzeria stacks up the most reader support in a category wins it. Because the form sits on a standard news page, reaching it takes nothing more than the project address during a live cycle.

Where this ballot sits among New York's reader polls

The Times Union pizza ballot has company on this site's New York shelf. Closest in spirit is the Best Burger Competition, which fights over a rival food staple with the same public-vote shape. The downstate programs work differently: Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx and The City's Best, Best of New York City each sweep a whole borough's worth of categories into one ballot.

Best of Hudson Valley rounds out the set for the neighboring region north of the city. Against that field, the Capital Region ballot stands out for concentration. Rather than spreading across dozens of business types, it narrows to one food category that the organizer itself calls the strongest vote-getter in its survey, a function of how seriously New York takes pizza.

Why the Capital Region contest runs hot

A single-category ballot compresses the whole competition into a short list of familiar local names, and the paper's own note about its pizza categories pulling the most votes tells you turnout concentrates there. For a pizzeria owner comparing markets, that means a smaller geographic stage than the borough-wide ballots but a far denser fight per category.

Building support for a pizzeria during the round

Two moments matter in this survey, and both reward preparation. The nomination phase is the gate: customers who take thirty seconds to nominate a shop are the reason it appears on the ballot at all, so a quiet push for nominations before the window pays off later. Once voting opens, the once-per-individual-per-day rule turns persistence into arithmetic, since a diner reminded each morning can add support every day of the phase.

Beyond that daily limit, the organizer's pages carry no published guidance on outside assistance, so any campaign built on wider outreach stands or falls on how well it fits the printed rule. Structured approaches to widening a fan base, from email lists to social reminders, are collected step by step in the guide to getting more votes online, and shops weighing paid support options can read how such arrangements are typically organized on the award-votes page. Whatever route a campaign takes, keeping it inside the survey's stated cadence is the part the organizer actually polices.